Restaurant review: Café Boulud

Four Seasons Hotel, 60 Yorkville Ave.
416-964-0411, fourseasons.com/toronto/dining/cafe_boulud/
We’ve eaten dinner, the server hovers. “How was it?” No point in evading the truth. “It’s the worst dinner I’ve had in a long time,” I finally say, not identifying myself. “UH, uh, well, come back tomorrow, the day after, next week,” he says moving away with his signature sign-off, “Voila!”
I have to be scraped off the floor. For months, I’ve been waiting for Café Boulud to open in the new Four Seasons hotel, a crystal palace that towers over Yorkville and Bay. This was expected to be something of a game changer. CB was, so I understood, to be a spinoff of Chef Daniel Boulud’s Upper East Side location, one of the city’s most popular restaurants.
Boulud has reshaped New York dining since his arrival in 1982 and now has seven restaurants calibrated brilliantly to the city’s restive eaters. And he’s done so without ruffling feathers in a city sensitive to French invasions. His provenance is Lyons and he has the kind of un-intimidating charm that once made Boulevardier Maurice Chevalier the toast of the U.S. Boulud has made himself into an irresistible amalgam of accessible French and American tastes. His flagship restaurant Daniel, three Michelin stars, is one of the five top restaurants in the city, nestled in the former Mayflower Hotel on the Upper East Side, a venue that could be a clip from Woody Allen’s Manhattan. At dusk, when the lights go up in the elegant brownstones and the triplexes and duplexes of Park Avenue, you are wafted back to the days when this was the city’s power hub, the home of the heirs of the gilded age, names like Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Mellon, Astor …
They wouldn’t recognize Daniel, a showpiece with an imperial entrance that evokes the unabashed ebullience of one of the one of the more self-indulgent Roman emperors — the dining room is like a circus ring, large tables in the well, overlooked by a mezzanine of cozier arrangements. A big intricate tasting menu is the star item. The presentation, the service is near perfection.
Of course I never expected Daniel to be replicated — just a good replica of Café Boulud would do. No brainer, I think.
How wrong I am. My companion eats a terrine of duck and foie gras, black fig, pistachio, spelt levain ($18) — it has a day-old ducky flavour and inside the slice, a pea of foie gras. I can’t believe a professional chef could make ceviche so flavourless as the fluke in celery vinaigrette ($17). I can’t believe that Tyler Shedden wants his name on the warm lobster salad, half a romaine lettuce topped with pieces of not-so-tender lobster so soaked in lemon that the shellfish flavour is obliterated. An elaborate dish of veal loin rounds, veal cheeks, sweetbreads, oyster mushrooms, carrot confit, garlic-parmesan grits ($27), all words, little flavour.
The menu is divided in four parts — La Tradition, La Saison, Le Voyager, Le Potager — with dishes that rarely sound French. When I see the words French Restaurant, I want the real thing, not something for cosmopolites. My idea of a good French meal is the one I enjoyed last year at the Terminus Gare de Nord Brasserie. An impersonal maitre d, staff who look as if they’d survived many front lines, no star chef — but what I ate! Huge fresh oysters, bubbling with brine, a nice slice of pate de foie gras, perfectly fresh and seasoned steak tartar, blond fat fries, a few exquisite leaves of salad, and to end, the dessert to end all desserts, oeufs à la neige, a blown-out dandelion head of meringue on a pool of creme anglaise.
A couple of days after my visit to Café Boulud, I receive an email from Chef Boulud, inviting me and a guest to be his guests at a magnificent dinner at Daniel. I’d love to go. But I feel down. Chef Boulud, I expected you to bring your stardust to Toronto.